A Torn Hammock on Great Slave Lake

From the glacial restraint comes
a liquid abandon, an exact science
randomly, exactly, exacting excursions
into matter excommunicated by immaterial,
too slippery for solid thought,
too rigid for moving on. Broken dead branches
mended by rugged icicles exempt from
gravity’s pull, ghosting their way under
the aurora borealis, affecting quiescent
ice-punctured shores, as memory with teeth chattering,
lies in a torn hammock on Great Slave Lake.

The deepest lake in north America is not deep
enough for angels to disappear, behold
the syntax of fear in their wings, burnt
like incense in a monastery, a clattering of
ordained terror under the halted silence
of prehistoric glaciers.
Ice summons the past and melts it to oblivion,
prowling water beneath beckons our future
for a long wintry darkness where we are
trapped, condemned to the permafrost
of loss, without the possibility of parole.

***

Our Lady of Perpetual Help Cemetery

. For Geo (2010-2013)

She is not there, our Lady of…
perpetual… helpless,
walking with salt in our pockets. Every
few slow steps a grave disposition, taut
chords of inner violins,
striking in metronomic consistency the intimate
pace of breathing light at
the edge of a young life stolen
by drunken stupor. He was the youngest
buried there…

The eyes drowse over stones scribbled
with a dense unravelling of meaning, loss
of utterances, in memory of a snowflake,
melted in a baby’s hand, redolent with laughter.

So little time to hold them and never let go,
so much space between us and them,
stones fused with earth, earth with grass,
grass with stone on earth, organic ruins
of a desire for flight…
no one ever leaves a cemetery
where a loved one lies, beneath our sole.

Perpetual time shedding skins of mourning,
death forcing us to live, eat, celebrate,
flatten the creases, turn layers of sorrow
into blankets we spread for
a picnic with our mortality.

No one speaks at cemeteries, not out of
reverence for the dead, but because
memory sits in a silent wake
to its ghostly promise, afraid that
even its ghosts may have skeletons.

***

Donia G. Mounsef is a Canadian-Lebanese poet, playwright and dramaturge who splits her time on either side of the Canadian Shield, between Toronto and Edmonton where she teaches theatre and poetry at the University of Alberta. She is the author of the poetry collection Plimsoll Lines (Urban Farmhouse Press, 2018) and chapbook Slant of Arils (Damaged Goods Press, 2015), and her writing has appeared in Pacific Review, The Harpoon Review, La Vague Journal, Habitat Literary Magazine, The Toronto Quarterly, Bluestem, Yes Poetry, Gutter Eloquence, Poetry Quarterly, Lavender Review, Linden Avenue, Bookends Review, Gravel Magazine, Skin 2 Skin, Iris Brown, Reverie’s Rage Anthology, and 40 Below Anthology.